‘Sitting on My Hands on This One’

When the idea first arose about the Academy honoring Elia Kazan with a lifetime achievement award, I didn’t think too much about it. In fact, I casually signed an endorsement of the award in December. I thought, well, he’s done great work, why not? But in the past months, the situation has become, like life, not so black-and-white.

When columnist Richard Cohen wrote that Kazan should be honored precisely because of his anti-communism, I gulped. What anti-communism, I thought? Had I missed something these last 30 years? Kazan’s anti-communist career lasted barely as long as it took to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Then Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in the New York Times that the only people who were against this award, or against Kazan, were Communists themselves. That was too astonishing to let pass.

The tragedy of the blacklist is far more than can be reduced to such simplistic and wrongheaded statements. And like so many things that should be uncomplicated and are not, the award became about much more than what is engraved on the bottom of a statue.

Since the fall of communism in 1989, it might be tempting to view the anti-communist crusade of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s as justified. Certainly the left in the U.S. is culpable for not seeing and condemning Stalinism for what it was, shorn of ideal talk: a totalitarian and inhumane tyranny. For that refusal, the left bears enormous responsibility.

But the right, at the same time, was guilty of wrapping their its anti-communism in virulent anti-Semitism, racism and nativism, making it all but impossible for millions of people to go along with what was perceived as unspoken messages that confused the basic issues and hid a very dark and ugly side of the right. The HUAC should not have been the place that principled men and women were asked to express their political beliefs.

But even if you were against Stalin, did you have to participate in these exercises of contempt and hatred and self-loathing? If you were afraid of the communist threat, was the only way to be counted to crawl before HUAC to endure a public ritual that history now interprets as paranoiac and shameful? The fact is that testifying was designed by the right as a triumphant and contemptuous purge of the left. It was done out of mortal fear. It had no spark of courage or forthrightness to it. Decent people were made to do indecent things, and some became indecent in the doing.

Elia Kazan is a great director, and he has been amply rewarded for that by the Academy in the past. But if this award becomes something else, if it endorses the idea that it would somehow fulfill a debt that hasn’t been paid, then I object.

If we are being asked to say, “Let us forgive it, it was such a long time ago and, after all, isn’t he feisty and somehow heroic at this late date,” or worse, if we are being asked to say that what was done was morally right, then, no, this is all poppycock. No implicit support should be allowed that crime. He should be denied this applause if it means we are saying he was either right, which he was not, or harmless, which he was not.

While there will be many filmmakers, many of whom I count as friends, cheering him for his artistry, I cannot agree to those cheers if it means supporting his reprehensible act of naming names. I don’t define Kazan himself as evil; the terror that prevailed in the ‘50s was so fearful that I don’t know what I would have done had I been placed in that crucible. But that doesn’t remove me from my responsibility to stand against what I see as his terrible moral lapse.

I empathize with the desperate fear that led many people to do things that were regrettable, as I empathize with the damage done to so many people whose only crime was in being politically naive. Of course, there were many who were more guilty than that, but the institutionalized humiliations and purposeful imposition of indignities by HUAC and its supporters were not the manner in which to handle them. And there were the true innocents, children, wives and husbands, who should never have been in the line of fire, and who were hurt, some beyond repair, by the words of people like Kazan.

I will not be in Los Angeles next week, and I guess that’s why this has been preying on my mind so much. I don’t want to be found wanting when I am asked in later years, where did you stand about the Kazan award? He was first an icon, and then a bogeyman of my youth, falling like the central character in some Greek myth from hero to villain in the twinkling of an eye. His work has not been neglected, and he has not gone without honor. Let that suffice. I am sitting on my hands on this one.